Descomplica
The boot of intelligence, heightened sense, and quick response. the magista athlete creates and controls. They are the ultimate playmakers, anticipating the opponents next move and creating the plays that spark the attack.
Year
Client
Category
Credits
2018 — 2022
Descomplica
Product Design, Branding Experience, Social
In-House Creative Studio and Product Design Team
Building Up a Design Culture
When I arrived at Descomplica, years ago, I wanted to build not just a workplace that was rewarding, challenging and positive, but to set a culture, a mindset where everyone in the design department should be able to have your own voice. To achieve this, I started with a simple question, “How do you create a place where people can thrive doing their best work?”
— Design system, Branding Development
The mindset and values
Hire Slow And Create Mighty Teams
No rush! Contrary to popular work belief "move fast and break things - hire fast". Actually, hiring slow and maintaining a small team has tons of benefits. Hiring slowly allows us to take our time to find excellent candidates who truly understand the teams and company mission to bring people together. It means our team has a greater opportunity to develop meaningful relationships. Best of all, it means that each employee has a deeper opportunity to learn and grow with the company. Furthermore, a small team forces to choose the work that brings the greatest results — the path of highest compounding leverage. It forces us to say no to good ideas and yes to great ones.
How to unleash the best?
Freedom Is Always A Choice
People want the freedom to be creative in their approach to solving problems. I’ve found the conditions needed for someone to be creative boil down to two questions and the space to answer them — what outcome am I trying to achieve and why does this outcome matter?
The entirety of our planning process is about clarifying the what and why of someone’s work. The entirety of our management process is about supporting people to actually do the work which ties into our leadership philosophy as written above.
Seek The Mastership
One of the most motivating things for a high performing person is making sure their work is important and challenging. Their projects should let them stretch beyond their comfort zone, but not so far that they aren’t successful. To make sure they succeed, everyone provides constant, real time feedback with 1on1 sessions (individual feedback rounds) and Design Syncs (group feedback rounds) both of the rituals has different purposes, when engaged together the complete each other with singular perspectives. This structure creates an incredibly fast learning cycle that allows everyone to grow and improve in real time instead of accumulating feedback into a grueling annual review. Feedback is a dialogue and we recruit everyone to participate regardless of position. Team members are encouraged to give their feedback to leadership as much as leadership is encouraged to share feedback with their team members.
The Right Connections With The Right Purpose
Do the right connection: learn is for everybody, the point is to deliberately hire people who can connect with our mission, which truly believes in the power of changing the world by education and technology. When they do, it means they sweat the details. It means people put in the extra "oomph" to make something great. So many things just “happen” because people care. It’s not possible to manufacture this — we look for it during our hiring process and only hire people who care about why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Put Yourself In Their Shoes
It's extremely important to know and create this value inside the team, that: people don’t leave their personal life at the door. In the descomplica design department, we expect people to show up to do great work. That said, some days you’re just in a bad mood or having a rough time with something at home. We respect each other as people and have come to realize that acknowledging people’s emotions and keeping feelings in the open creates a much more supportive and effective environment.
